Basic Mending Clothing: How to Mend a Hole in Fabric
Live frugally by learning how to mend a hole in fabric to keep your clothing longer.
by Wren Everett
When I switched from being a city teacher to a rural homesteader, I figured a lot of things would change. Of course, my activities would shift from grading papers to planting beans, and I knew that my perspectives on life would probably shift, too. However, one change I hadn’t completely anticipated was how I viewed clothing.
As an avid hiker, I thought I had some decently sturdy clothes to depend on when we made the move. Well, homestead life proved that my city clothes were anything but long-lasting, and within the first year, I had accumulated more tears, gouges, rips, frays, and holes than you could shake a stick at! However, remember that perspective-shift I mentioned earlier? That (and a desire to live frugally) kept me from throwing my clothes away. A hole torn in a shirt didn’t render the whole shirt useless, after all, and knowing that Americans throw millions of tons of perfectly serviceable clothing away annually had me sick with the thought of the waste.
So, I took up unsteady needle and thread and began to mend my clothing rather than replacing it. Unlike my former coworkers, I knew my chickens wouldn’t judge me for a patch or two (or three). If you, likewise, want to know how to fix some favorite garments in need of a little TLC, here are some ways to extend their useful lives.
Stitches
Sometimes, a seam comes apart, or a hem unravels, but the clothing itself is still perfectly fine. In this case, all that needs to be done is to stop the wayward threads from continuing to deconstruct their garment and replace them with sturdier stitches instead. With special garments, you’ll want to select a thread that matches the original thread, or, at the very least, doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. With work clothes, use whatever thread is at hand!
If you have a sewing machine, a straight line of stitches extending beyond the seam’s unraveling portion usually does the job. If you don’t have a sewing machine, the backstitch, as demonstrated in the photos, also does a serviceable job joining seams. In both cases, you’ll likely find that your redone seam is twice as strong as the factory-made one that preceded it.
Patches
Anyone who does any physical work knows how easy it is to tear a hole in any given piece of attire. A snag here, a brush against a bush there, and a gaping hole suddenly appears where there shouldn’t be one. Though patches seem pretty basic, there’s an art to them that the fledgling garment-mender will start to learn through practice.
First, patches need to be made of a material similar to the garment you’re fixing. Don’t patch a cotton shirt with a piece of polyester or a wool vest with a patch of linen — unrelated cloths will react differently to being washed and worn and may pucker, shrink, or rip away more easily.
Second, decide if you want the patch on the inside of the clothing or the outside. A patch on the outside will protect the damaged area more effectively, but will be more visually obvious. A patch on the inside of the garment can be camouflaged to be less noticeable but leaves the torn area exposed and potentially able to be snagged and torn anew. For super heavy-duty mending, you can make a patch for both the inside and outside, sandwiching the damaged area in new cloth for a sturdy fix.
Third, consider quilting your patch to make it more effective. This is particularly useful when the patch is placed in a high-traffic area of the clothing, such as in the upper inseam of a pair of jeans, where the legs can rub together, or on a knee, where a dramatic tear could threaten to continue all around the pant leg.
Making a patch is pretty simple: cut a scrap of fabric larger than the hole, hem the whole patch, and apply it over the hole to bring the garment back together (and remove unwanted drafts).
Darning
Knitting is a labor of love, from the relatively quick work of making a sock to the months-long endeavor of constructing an adult sweater. If a hole appears in a knitted garment, or if a high-use area wears threadbare, darning prevents the heartbreak of watching the garment unravel.
Darning is, essentially, weaving a patch of new fabric right over a hole. Before I begin, I first secure any loose loops of knitted fabric by passing a thread through them — this keeps further runs from developing while working on the hole. Then, through careful stitching and meticulous needle-weaving, I fabricate new cloth on the spot, making a custom-fit patch that may blend nearly seamlessly back into the garment if I use the proper gage and color of yarn.
Retrofitting
Sometimes, the damage done to an article of clothing is serious. I had a sleeve of a flannel shirt get totally shredded on some fencing — we’re talking the sort of rip that has separated the fibers beyond patching. So, do I toss an otherwise useful shirt based on a single sleeve? Nope! Instead, I trimmed and hemmed both sleeves to a nice, t-shirt length, quickly transforming a winter shirt into a summer shirt. The same process can be used to turn pants into shorts or long skirts into slightly shorter skirts.
Of course, sometimes the tear isn’t in a conveniently trimmable section, such as one of my work skirts that dramatically tore right at the hip and around the backside. In such cases, the garment may be totaled. Or is it? In the case of my endlessly torn work skirts, I found that the best solution for otherwise unsalvageably torn wearables was to cut useful squares from the surviving material and simply sew them into an all-new patchwork skirt … All the extra material from this project went into the scrap bag, where I know I’ll soon use them for patches. Two useless skirts then became one sturdy one, which was a pretty fair trade in my book.
As I hope you now see, mending isn’t just an old-fashioned way to save money. It’s a thrifty, loving, and thoughtful way to make our clothes work (almost!) as hard as we do while wearing them.
Originally published in the July/August 2023 issue of Countryside and Small Stock Journal and regularly vetted for accuracy.
Wren Everett and her husband quit their teaching jobs in the city and moved back to the land on 12 acres in the Ozarks. There, they are learning to live as modern peasants: off-grid, as self-sufficient as possible, and quite happily.
Originally published in the July/August 2024 issue of Countryside and Small Stock Journal and regularly vetted for accuracy.
